Remembering Ross Storey

Ross spent more than thirty years working with the Department of Primary Industries in Mareeba.

Over that time he helped many entomologists, particularly in the Far North, learn more about the craft before he died last year.

In recognition of his work, Jack, founder of the Australian Insect Farm, has named a beetle he discovered after Ross.

"It was sort of a personal acknowledgement for a lot of years of assistance and help mentoring, I s'pose. Ross was an inspiration to entomologists in North Queensland, Australia and around the world," he says.

Jack originally collected the beetle from Mt. Lewis, west of Julatten in Far North Queensland in the early nineties.

"I saw a little beetle flying around this rainforest tree so I had to climb up another small tree beside this huge rainforest tree to be able to net the beetle," he says.

"It was raining the whole time and by the end of the day I had about half-a-dozen of these small beetles and a couple of other species that I'd found at the same time which also turned out to be new species."

The storeyus pseudodipterus which feeds on rainforest trees hadn't been described until Jack published a paper on the beetle last month.

Relatively small for a beetle, it is about 12 millimetres in size, black and gold with fine hairs all over it.

The Australian Insect Farm so far, having found what Jack says are three new species of beetles already this year.

"It's quite interesting because so we've got quite a bit of work ahead of us yet to describe all those now," Jack says.

Describing a beetle can be a cumbersome and tiring process.

"You basically have to do a world search of museums, look at the material that they've got and then do preparations of the specimens to find out whether they are new or not and start the process of describing it after that," he says.

"It can take up to a year before a paper is published and a beetle can be described as a new species."